Darcus Howe, the warrior

Last week his death was widely reported in all the British media.

Howe left TT for Britain to study law but became a thorn in the side of the establishment, first as a British Black Panther member in the 1960s when West Indians suffered as British people struggled to come to terms with the many children of the Empire in their midst.

His older partner and mentor was another admired civil rights activist, Trinidadian John La Rose, founder of New Beacon Books and later the George Padmore Institute in north London, still a centre of West Indian intellectual life.

The two led a change-making campaign for justice in 1981 after 13 Caribbean youngsters died in New Cross, London, in a fire suspected of being a racist attack, and the police mishandled the investigations.

They also started the Race Today Collective, the Race Today magazine, and the now defunct International Book Fair of Radical Black & Third World Books, with Jessica and Eric Huntley of Bogle- L’Ouverture Publications.

Howe first became well known for defending himself in the Mangrove Nine Trial in 1971 and irrevocably turning the national spotlight on police racism. Trinidadian Frank Critchlow’s Notting Hill restaurant, The Mangrove, was a funky place for Trinis and liberal whites but the police considered it a drugs den and raided it repeatedly.

The two men led a march to protest police harassment that ended in violence; they were arrested, charged and tried. Howe unsuccessfully demanded an all-black jury but dispatched his white lawyers and succeeded in proving to the judge that police racism was the issue. A media-frenzy, two-month trial led to acquittals and fame.

It was through the media that Howe reached a wide public. He edited the seminal Race Today magazine and wrote a weekly column for the left-wing New Statesman for many years, always offering a unique insight into public matters.

The Bandung Files, his well known television programme with fellow civil rights activist Tariq Ali, had a refreshingly different current affairs agenda from the BBC and ITV, and won them a dedicated viewership and much respect.

When diagnosed with prostate cancer, which affects higher numbers of black men, Howe turned that too into a campaign for them to be tested. He took on battles at every turn, often falling out with friends for ideological and also personal reasons, as he did eventually with La Rose. My only interaction with him was at a public event, and it was confrontational. I remember saying almost nothing in response.

I never got to know him because I found him menacing. He used his bigness and ferocious intelligence to intimidate people and to get his way.

Yet, I am sure he was a warm and funny man with a typically infectious Trini love of life, and English people finally embraced him and admired him.

Everyone in the UK owes him some gratitude for the important role he played in strengthening the social fabric of the country.

I personally thank Howe, his wife Leila Hassan and the Race Today Collective “family” for caring for the great CLR James during his final years.

An older cousin to Howe, CLR lived upstairs the Collective offices on Railton Road in Brixton among his books and modest possessions, not in luxurious comfort, yet his needs were looked after and he happily received visitors and friends there, eager to share his long memories, his theories and politics.

CLR James will be remembered in a series of events — readings, discussion, film and an extempo debate — at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest on April 27 at the National Library and Old Fire Station, starting at 9 am.